Tag Archives: self-pity

“Sometimes the questions are complicated because the answers are simple.” - Dr. Seuss / Art: Varela

Today Rebelión published the first of a two part interview Salim Lamrani did with Pentagon babe Yoani Sánchez. English translation here.

Salim says that an unnamed “western diplomat” who’d read some of the “relatively critical” articles he’d written about Yoani passed them along to her, and as a result she asked to meet with him to clear up a few things. They met in the middle of the afternoon at the bar in the Plaza Hotel in Havana. He describes her as affable, serene, never flustered, and with her experience dealing with Western media, “relatively practiced in the art of communication.”

The rest of the interview is a tour de force of incoherence and ignorance. But José Varela has already been busy with the machete, over at varela blog, and there’s no-one better.

Yoani Sánchez has been interviewed by a French journalist (complete Spanish text here) and has told him that she has photos of the blows she received in the street, but she doesn’t want to reveal them because she’s going to present them in court. This detail is significant because one’s credibility in court is not dependent on possibly self-inflicted or fabricated proof, but rather, proof collected in situ. It’s dependent on witnesses, experts, medical reports or a confession from the aggressor (or aggressors). If what she’s seeking is to denounce a violation (as seemingly suggested at first in the interview) the opportunity was lost by not publishing the photos on her blog or giving them to her great ally, the international press. But if she’s looking to punish her aggressors (which is what she said later), she’s not going about it the correct way. Continue reading →